--- "B." <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Where to look for a revolutionary potential?
>
>
>
> by Slavoj Žižek
>
>
>
>
> What one finds in the “really-existing slums” is, of
> course, a mixture
> of improvised modes of social life, from religious
> fundamentalist
> groups held together by a charismatic leader to
> criminal gangs, up to
> germs of new ‘socialist’ solidarity. The slum
> dwellers are the
> counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the
> so-called
> “symbolic class” (managers, journalists and PR
> people, academics,
> artists, etc.) which is also uprooted and perceives
> itself as directly
> universal (a New York academic has more in common
> with a Slovene
> academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from
> his campus). Is
> this the new axis of class struggle, or is the
> “symbolic class”
> inherently split, so that one can make the
> emancipatory wager on the
> coalition between the slum-dwellers and the
> progressive part of the
> symbolic class? What we should be looking for are
> the signs of the new
> forms of social awareness that will emerge from the
> slum collectives:
> they will be the germs of the future.
>
[WS:] Zizek may be up to something this time, especially re. the proximity of NYC and Slovene academics - but I think he is quite unrealistic about the revolutionary potential of the slum dwellers. In fact his percpeption of slum dwellers is that of a pampered star-eyed arm chair philsophiser who did not even come near a slum.
I did on, in Nairobi, inter alia. A short visit, to be sure, but eye opening. I got there thanks to an 'inside connection' - my driver lived there and offered to show it to me. Before I proceed I need to expaln why a driver employed by a univesity in Nairobi lived in a slum. He did so, because most of his salary, not so bad for local conditions, went to support his extended family, specifically health care.
There is no public health insurance in Kenya - hospital care is strictly on fee-for-service basis. As a rsult, extended families bear the finacial burden of hospital care of their relatives.
Now back to the Nairobi slums. Before we entered my host asked me to give him my briefcase - for safety, as he explained. Crime is rampant in Nairobi (appropriately dubbed Nairobbery) and being killed for a $50 mobile phone is not that unusual. The slum (btw briefly shown in the film _Constant Gardener_) is quite vast, a few square kilometers. It consists of huts build of assorted materials, mainly sod and scrap wood. There are no services of any kind, even the trash pickup, and no roads, just paths amidst piles of trash and huts. The stench was quite strong. There were many fires burning around around these households, which created smog that covered the entire area.
There were signs of economic activity everywhere. I briefly talked to a person (English is the offcial language in Kenya) who manufactured jewelery out of discarded animal bones. He would cut the bone into small pieces and then shape it and burn out patterns with hot iron (hence he needed the fire.) There was, btw, a lot of this kind of cottage manufactruing around as far as I could see. He gave me two necklacess - "one for you and one for your wife" - as a gift. I reciprocated with a few dollar bills that I still had in my pocket.
There was a "Hotel Safari" nearby - a one room sod hut maybe 3x3 meters, with a wooden sign above the entrance. As I was taking a picture of this establishment a woman ran out of somewhere and starte yelling at me that she was a Muslim and did not want white people taking picturs of her. I tried to explain that I was not taking pictures of her but of the structre, but she apparently did not listen and was more and more aggravated. Finally, my host talked to her and she turned back and walked away. FYI, as a rule I ask people for a permission to be photographed, if it is feasible. Generally, people have no problems with that, but sometimes they want a fee.
There was a railroad (1 meter narrow gauge) running through the slum with the freigh traffic once or twice a day. Otherwise it served as a major pedestrian thoroughfare for the inhabitants. It was crowded with people going to work, coming home, carrying stuff ... Next to the tracks was a two-storey cinderblock building with a nicely kept fenced-in yard around - a mansion by the local standards, indeed. It turned out it was a school building built with some sort of aid money - and the locals were quite proud of it. I was quite happy it was there too, a sign of hope and human dignity amidst the squarlor.
This was not the only slum I visited in my travels. I've also been to the slums of Siem Reap, Bangkok, Maputo, Santiago and Mexico City. In all those places I saw signs of social structure and order amids the squarlor. It is only pampered arm-chair philosophers and campus radicals bored with their middle class existence and trying to escape their petit bourgeois ennui by looking for the exotic that see a "boiling revoltionary mass" or similar bullshit. I see people trying to build normal lives and maintain order and dignity, even amidst squarlor. Anyone who is imagining that these pople would drop whatever little order and stability they have for the pseudo-revolutionary mumbo jumbo jumbo of the blase first world intellectuals needs to have his head examined.
There is very little doubt in my mind that the slum dwellers have elaborate social structure, norms of behavior, values, and informal social instituions that gives their lives a sense of direction and order. These may not be values, expectations or structures that a liberal intellectual like myself may find appealing - in fact some of them may be quite antithetical to what I believe. But seeing the slum dwellers and underlas in general as as a massive force majeure ready to swell and install a new higher world order is nothing but a delusion of a blase intellelctual waiting for the biggest spectacle of them all to happen.
A final comment - although Zizek is very careful to avoid romanticizing the underclass and slum dwellers - this is usually not the case of many self-styled radicals and lefties. It seems that thier vision of a "revolution" is to create an exciing spectacle: tear down the norms of everyday life and drag down the high culture to the gutters, instead of uplifting the underclass to the level of high culture. This is one of the main reasons that I am a wussy social democrat not a radical, and if by any remote chance the revolution finally comes to town, I will be sipping wine in my modest middle class apartment, looking through the window and waiting for all that brouhaha to die down.
Wojtek
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